Richard Crichton

Melbourne 1935

Crichton’s physical journeys, to America and Ireland and to the remoter parts of Aboriginal Australia, have been triggers for a grand search for origins. There’s an obvious contemporary relevance to this concern with population exchange, national and personal identity; but Crichton’s journeys are not intended as social commentary. More to do with a search for meaning and direction, personal milestones that might have a universal connection, the natural tendency of the artist to fully clothe his inner life… he makes paintings, not art-political statements about race relations or reconciliation. He deals not with cultural appropriations but with the abstract bones of picture making; expressive coloured shapes and spaces, inventive and emotionally loaded areas of flat stuff arranged on other flat stuff. Ronald Millar, artist and critic 2002.